Letters for March 5, 2020

Re: “Demolishing history” by James Peyton (Essay, Feb. 20):

Yes, some buildings and history should be preserved, but the general size of what’s being built shouldn’t matter. We should be building up rather than out; we should do more infill projects rather than huge developments with no character.

Lulu Cain Davey

Sacramento / via Facebook

Sick over change

Re: “Demolishing history” by James Peyton (Essay, Feb. 20):

I just want to say I totally agree with James Peyton, and his article is spot-on. Sacramento was a wonderful city and place to grow up and make memories. I was born and raised here in 1940. I never wanted to leave. The Tower Record buildings were such a part of history. I’m sick about what is happening to my birthplace.

Mary Oliver

Sacramento / via email

Divide water fairly

Re: “One tunnel, same distrust” by Scott Thomas Anderson (News, Feb. 13):

The state of California wants to put in this tunnel without having first said how much water is going to go through it and without saying how much is going to be left in the Delta to support the ecosystem and fish species. We need to first come up with a water allocation plan that looks at all of the users, instead of the status quo—give the water to the users with the biggest political clout.

Victor Rosasco

Stockton / via SN&R Extra

Delta falsehoods

Re: “One tunnel, same distrust” by Scott Thomas Anderson (News, Feb. 13):

Northern California has believed falsehoods about water management since the 1960s. The Delta has not been natural since the 1840s. Mining, agriculture, industry, recreation, timber harvesting—not to mention treated sewage and runoff from 7 million people living in the Bay Area, 2 million in the Sacramento region and 1 million in the Stockton region—make it a man-made environment.

We can make it a better man-made environment, but pretending the Delta is a natural system, refusing to build hydraulic systems that were planned in the 1960s and should have been built then and even building a small version of the peripheral canal is just silly and based on a series of falsehoods. It’s a sad thing for California that we cannot consider the reasonable management of our precious resources and instead rely on a fake view about our water resources.

Jerome Gilbert

Greenbrae / via SN&R Extra

A healthier path

Re: “The right road” by Benjamin Etgen (Essay, Feb. 13):

It’s not a big surprise that car ownership amounts to a regressive “tax” that also makes people unhealthier. Even a 10-minute daily walk produces significantly fewer late-life health problems. Add to this the fact that our population’s fastest growing demographic is folks older than 85—talk about dangerous drivers—and transit of any kind looks far healthier and better.

Sabotaging transit with more outlying, edge-city development is already underway (it makes lots of money for the land speculators), but we can still have far better bus service, and perhaps diminish the diseases of chronic inactivity—obesity, heart attack, stroke, diabetes, etc.—that afflict our country. Also worth remembering: non-subsidized bus service requires enough people within a walk to the stops, so more homes per acre and pedestrian-friendly streets are part of the picture, not just more buses.

Mark Dempsey

Orangevale / via email